What can a science teacher do with several pounds of candy, 4 bags of gelatin, a pitcher of water, and 12 plastic sandwich containers? Build jello cell models, of course! Here's the set up prior to the lab. Never content to just build models, I had each group make a poster on construction paper to accompany their model. They had to list each organelle and which type of candy they chose to represent it, and write a paragraph explaining how to improve their model. This weekend, each student has to make a poster or write a short essay describing a metaphor for a cell. For example, "A cell is like a factory. The mitochondria are like electrical generators, the cell wall is like the wall of the factory, the endoplasmic reticulum is like the assembly line..."